Monroe Free Library

What started as a hashtag in 2013 quickly grew into the Black Lives Matter movement. Black Lives Matter examines the police shootings that fueled the movement, the events that led up to racial tensions in the United States, and the goals the movement has set for the future. Easy-to-read text, vivid images, and helpful back matter give readers a clear look at this subject. Features include a table of contents, infographics, a glossary, additional resources,...

"This first collection by award-winning author John Yau, drawn from decades of work, includes essays about Black, Asian, Latinx, and Native American artists: sculptors Luis Jimenez and Ruth Asawa; "second generation Abstract Expressionists" such as the Black painter Ed Clark and the Japanese American painter Matsumi Kanemitsu; the performance artists James Luna and Patty Chang; the photographers Laurel Nakadate and Teju Cole; and a generation of Asian...

From Slave Ship to Harvard is the true story of an African American family in Maryland over six generations. The author has reconstructed a unique narrative of black struggle and achievement from paintings, photographs, books, diaries, court records, legal documents, and oral histories. From Slave Ship to Harvard traces the family from the colonial period and the American Revolution through the Civil War to Harvard and finally today.

"Uniting disparate histories of slavery, Mormonism, popular culture, and American medicine, Angela Pulley Hudson weaves together a fascinating tale of ingenuity, imposture, and identity. While laying bare the complex relationship between race, religion, and gender across much of the nineteenth-century United States and Canada, Hudson shows how shifting concepts of identity were understood and performed in the context of vast social changes. Through...

"A powerful rumination on how we can draw on historical examples of "survivor power" to understand the upheaval and death caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and collectively heal"--

Finalist for the 1991 National Book Award and a New York Times Notable book, Praying for Sheetrock is the story of McIntosh County, a small, isolated, and lovely place on the flowery coast of Georgia--and a county where, in the 1970s, the white sheriff still wielded all the power, controlling everything and everybody. Somehow the sweeping changes of the civil rights movement managed to bypass McIntosh entirely. It took one uneducated, unemployed black...

This definitive biography tells the story of the former slave Olaudah Equiano (1745?—1797), who in his day was the English-speaking world's most renowned person of African descent. Equiano's greatest legacy is his classic 1789 autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself. A key document of the early movement to ban the slave trade, as well as the fundamental text in the...

Originally published in 1969 to broad critical acclaim, This Child's Gonna Live is an unsurpassed testament to human endurance in the face of poverty, racism, and despair. Set in a fishing village on Maryland's Eastern Shore in the 1930s, this story has as its main character the unforgettable Mariah Upshur, a hard-working, sensual, resilient woman, full of hope, and determination despite living in a society that conspires to keep her down. In her...

Between 1888 and 1930, African Americans opened more than a hundred banks and thousands of other financial institutions. In Banking on Freedom, Shennette Garrett-Scott explores this rich period of black financial innovation and its transformative impact on U.S. capitalism through the story of the St. Luke Bank in Richmond, Virginia: the first and only bank run by black women. Banking on Freedom offers an unparalleled account of how black women carved...

"Sitting In, Standing Up: Leaders of the Civil Rights Era tells the story of one of the most tumultuous and important eras in American history through the lives of five major figures of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s: Thurgood Marshall, Fannie Lou Hamer, Martin Luther King, Jr., Ella Baker, and John Lewis. Hands-on activities, essential questions, text-to-world connections, and links to online resources encourage readers ages 12...